Spicy Web Designer Interview with Nick Finck of Blue Flavor

Nick Finck (nickfinck.com) is a user experience professional who has dabbled in the web for over a decade. He specializes in information architecture, interaction design, usability and user research.

Nick has created web experiences for Fortune 50 and 500 companies including Adobe, Boeing, Blue Cross / Blue Shield, Cisco, CitiGroup, FDIC, Harpo, HP, IBM, Microsoft, PBS, Peet’s Coffee, University of Denver, and others.

He lives and plays in Seattle, Washington, where he’s a co-founder of Blue Flavor (blueflavor.com), a web design company that focuses on creating web experiences.

Nick has authored many web design-related articles for various publications. He’s the founder of the long-time and very popular Digital Web Magazine publication (digital-web.com). Check out the magazine’s archives to see the caliber of authors and articles it presented to web designers from all over the world. He is a judge for an organization that presents one of the most prestigious web awards in the industry.

He has built a reputation as a community volunteer, promoting growth within the web industry both locally and abroad. You can find Nick giving lectures for leading organizations, events and universities.

1. Have you ever designed websites?  If so, when did you start and how has it helped you better understand user experience?

Back in 1995 I started building websites.  They didn’t really have “design” per say, at least not like it is today.  Over time I focused more on front-end development (things like XHTML, CSS, JavaScript, etc).  Eventually I started exploring design (layout, color, typography, etc), even did some freelance work as a web designer but it never really took for me.  I think that understanding that I am not really cut out to be a web designer not only helped me hone in on my true talents but also allowed me to better respect the work of other web designers I may be working with.  Understanding the fundamentals of both front-end development and web design helped me to set the context for my eventual work as a information architect doing user experience design (website strategy, hierarchy and organization, wireframes, etc).  It allowed me to know how all the pieces fit together and how to develop ideas that flowed easily into design and the native languages of the web.

2. When did you first start learning about user experience?

That’s a interesting question and to be honest I can’t really put my finger on it.  I think the issue for me is that user experience is not specifically a skill set; it is a series of skill sets.  To me the user experience encompasses things like visual design, front-end development, information architecture, interaction design, information design, and more.  Initially we just used “webmaster” to describe someone who did it all, but as the web came of age (though it’s still maturing as we speak) that role was segmented into several roles that you see today.  User experience has been an easy way to describe someone who not only did their work focusing on the user’s needs but also described individuals who may be both a web designer and a front-end web developer, or perhaps a information architect and web designer, etc., etc.   So in short the term user experience grew out of the need to easily group and label someone or a group of people who may have many different hats.  So to bring this all back to your question, the day I started learning about user experience is the day I started thinking about the user when I was doing my web work.

3. What are the biggest challenges that you face in user experience design?

It’s interesting to me how others respond to the kind of work I do.  I get comments like “man, that’s has to be difficult to define a structure for a disorganized site.”  The funny thing is that defining the structure or at least exploring options for that structure is an easy thing for me and my colleagues who mostly hail from some form of library science background.  So the most difficult part of the job isn’t designing the solution, it’s selling the solution and getting buy-in.  I spend a lot of time working with clients on understanding the core problems, consensus building, and getting buy in from the various decision makers involved in a project.  Projects succeed or fail based on what the user experience expert can get buy in on and what they cannot.  So it’s not really a matter of if the solution is the right one or at least one that will work, 13 years of doing this has taught me to trust my ideas, it’s a matter of being able to pitch and sell your solution by identifying the numbers and really showing the ROI of a particular solution.

4. Where did you go to school and has it helped you become a better web designer?

I went to school at the Northwest Film Center in Portland, Oregon.  My educational background is in film, video, and animation.  It’s interesting that I thought the path into multimedia, which I took some 15 years ago, was going to make all those years in film, video and animation obsolete.  Yet, today I find some of those core skills even more useful as a user experience professional.  For example understanding how to sketch and storyboard, knowing the various aspect ratios of video and film, understanding motion and objects interacting with other objects, etc.  So not all was lost.  That aside, had there been an option to study web design or information architecture back then it probably would have enabled me to get up to speed faster than being self taught.  I feel education is critical to the success of anyone involved with crafting the user experience.  To this end you may have noticed that the various volunteer projects I have chosen to be involved with for the better part of my spare time focus on education formal or otherwise; Digital Web Magazine, WaSP Interact curriculum framework, Refresh Seattle, InfoCamp, WebVisions, etc.

5. Since you first started how has the user experience and interaction design industry changed? Has it changed for the better? If so, how? If not, please explain?

Like I mentioned, when I first started the term “user experience” wasn’t really used, at least not in reference to how we think of it today.  Things like information architecture wasn’t even thought of. Web strategy was just about scheduling the phases of the web project.  User-centered design was just a concept to many people.  Back then the project managers created the sitemaps, the designers built the architecture into their comps, and the developers just made it all happen somehow. Today things are a lot different in that we spend more time in thinking and really understanding how the website is going to come together and what problems it’s going to solve.  Today anyone can build a website from start to finished in a day, what matters is how effective the website is, how easy it is to use, and how clear it is to understand what the website is about.  The web has moved from being a place to represent a business or an idea, to a place where usefulness and value are key.  That’s quite a big step forward if you ask me, but we still have more progress to make.  Most businesses are just starting to grasp how key these things are and in doing so they are just now trying to learn what user experience is, what an interaction designer does, and what is the difference between that and the role of the web designer.  So just like we have early adopters to anything we will have late adopters as well and only through that natural progression will we progress as a industry.

6. What are your favorite tools to use when working on a user experience project? Why are they your favorite tools?

To me the tool you use isn’t as important as what it is you are trying to accomplish.  I have seen many great designers use tools for tasks I couldn’t even imagine using them for.  Understanding that simple concept is pretty critical to any professional.  to that end I tend to find myself gravitating towards tools that understand this concept and really cater to the tasks at hand.  These tools can be anything from simply types of documents and diagrams explaining how something works so I can better communicate to the client.  They also might be software tools that enable me to do my job most effectively and efficiently.  This is why for wireframing I prefer to use OmniGraffle.  For developing content inventories I prefer to use Apple Numbers.  For developing presentations I prefer to use Apple Keynote.  For managing my projects and communications with the client I prefer to use 37Signals Basecamp.  For keeping track of the time I spend on my projects I prefer to use Harvest.  For conducting user tests I prefer to use Silverback.  And for writing my findings reports I prefer to use Apple Pages.  Ultimately what really matters is that you use whatever works best for you.

7. What is the vision behind Blue Flavor in terms of catering towards user experience as it relates to solid web design?

Back when we started Blue Flavor we had all been through the experiences of working as freelancers, on in-house teams, and at agencies and we felt we could do better.  We knew that we all were tired of working in a place where decisions were set upon you as a professional that did not enable the best user experience and design possible for the solution.  We knew that often times we would see solutions identified before we really knew the core problems at hand.  We knew that business decisions and business needs often seemed to trump user needs.  We knew that technology constraints often dictated how useful the design was.  We knew this and we felt it was the wrong way to do business.  We feel that the best design and best user experiences come out of equal and balanced levels of the technical requirements, the business goals and the user needs.  We call this finding the sweet spot and this is what we focus on when we do our work.  In addition to finding the sweet spot we tend to pride ourselves on being transparent to the client and the users who will need to interact with whatever we design and build.  We take a no BS approach to this and are honest with our clients and users.  We set expectations early and often.  We put our talent on the front line so the client works directly with the person doing the work.  We feel that all of this allows us to create better designs and ultimately better user experiences.

8.  Where did the idea for Digital Web Magazine come from?

The idea for Digital Web Magazine came from my website’s readers.  Since 1995 I was running digital-web.com as both a personal and professional site.  It had a resources area which contained links to useful information about building and designing web sites.  On the home page I had a blog, though I called it “daily news” (the term “blog” didn’t exist at that time) and it didn’t run on a blogging tool. It was just some text I updated on a static page every day.  In that news area I asked my site’s visitors one question every week.  One week I decided to ask my visitors what they thought I should do with the site, what it should evolve to.  The result was clear, they wanted an online resource of tutorials, articles, interviews, and reviews of software related to the web profession.  So in 1998 I rallied up a few friends; Jesse Nieminen, S. “Corin” Nguyen, Noah Maas to help build an ezine.

9.  What is your goal for Digital Web Magazine?

The goal of Digital Web Magazine was to help educate those in and entering the industry about best practices of web design and development.  There were only a handful of web sites publishing editorially vetted content that covered the web profession and most had specific areas of focus (i.e. just covering HTML and JavaScript, CSS wasn’t around then).  We wanted to cover the full gamut of professional web design and development from code to content, from project management to website strategy.  I wanted the publication to become a resource where anyone who wanted to learn about how to be a web professional could.  It would be a user contributed ezine that is peer reviewed and edited.  In it’s most basic form, I wanted to give back to the web community for all it had given to me through web forums, mailing lists and web design IRC channels.  I think, looking back, we did just that and we did it well for over 10 years.

10.  How do you think Digital Web Magazine benefits the web design community at large?

I think it gave authors a chance to get their message out to a larger audience back when search wasn’t quite fixed and you had to manually submit your websites to search engines to even be indexed.  So more than anything, for the authors, it was a chance to get noticed.  For the readers it was a chance to learn.  A resource that wasn’t so academic that it was hard to read or follow yet not so informal that the quality of content didn’t gain any readership trust.  I think it allowed for members of the web community to communicate what they have learned from the various projects they were working on and share those experiences with the rest of the community.  Readers became authors.  Individuals who had incredible talent but were largely overlooked by the rest of the web community started be noticed thru sharing these experiences.  Reputations were formed and techniques were discovered.  I feel for a lot of the contributors Digital Web Magazine was their first step in a long and successful career.  Many contributors went on to write books, speak at conferences and built strong personal brands.  Some went on to establish their businesses, others got into prestigious design schools.  I think Digital Web Magazine, now that it has ceased publication, will continue to benefit the web community at large even years later.  People will continue to learn from its articles.  I learned a lot from the whole experience myself and I am glad that back in 1998 I took a chance and listened to my visitors.